Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an autonomous action robot and a control method for an autonomous action robot.
Description of Related Art
In recent years, there are being developed autonomous action robots that act autonomously with an object of coexisting as partners of humans. Among this type of autonomous action robots, there is one that performs preliminarily determined actions in response to human voice.
For example, the autonomous action robot disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application, First Publication No. 2003-62777 detects sound emitted from a sound source, and identifies the direction of the sound source based on the detected sound. In the autonomous action robot, it is controlled so that its image capturing unit faces in the identified sound source direction, and an image of the periphery of the sound source direction is captured. Furthermore, in the autonomous action robot, a target image is extracted from the captured image, and control is performed based on the extracted target image so that the image capturing unit faces in the direction toward the target image.
Moreover, in the case where the autonomous action robot is used in a room, the autonomous action robot, in some cases, may not be able to directly acquire sound due to the walls and corners in the room. In this type of case, the sound that the autonomous action robot is acquiring is a direct sound that comes directly from the sound source, a reflection that is reflected on the wall, a sound that is irradiated on the wall and that has transmitted through the wall while being attenuated according to the wall transmission loss, or a sound that travels around a shielding object and that reaches the back side thereof by diffraction.